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The worshiper is the father of the gods.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Dignity
Religion
Father
Gods

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There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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The genuine music lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it.
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I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding.
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Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
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I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know of very few individuals.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
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How little it takes to make life unbearable: a pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
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The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.
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The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
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Unionism, seldom if ever, uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguard bad work.
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To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.
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The other day a dog peed on me. A bad sign.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
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Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
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Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.
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